I listened to all this.  Half while at work and half on a car ride with my mother.  And I was enjoying the stories while I was listening, but as I write this a day later, I can not remember one of them.  This is book 2, and the first book had such memorable stories (skin falling off, library books attacking people, etc) that it is a bit sad, that I don’t remember this one. 

 

And so it ends.  For the last 3 years I have been living off the Halloween high of the Teen Killers Club books.  Quick recap. There is a test to determine how possible it is to become a serial killer.  Kids who get an A on this test are sent to camp to become assassins for the government.  Book 1 is about the test and about Camp. Our main character Signal Deere swears she did not kill her best friend and that she is no killer.  Erik is the bad boy.  He is Class A all the way.  Book 2 Erik and Signal run away from camp and fall in love.  Signal also learns about Erik’s backstory, where the test came from, and why he is a Class A.  Read the books, their great I promise.  I loved books 1 and 2, 

 

Now for book 3.  This is the cumulation of the story.  Signal is back with her campmates.  They are trying to take down camp, get rid of the test, and get everyone free.  Yeahhhh.  Erik is still on the run, because his brother wants him dead.  The entire group have become celebrities.  There are pro killers club groups and anti-killers club groups.  It is time to end things.  This book is my least favorite.  Some much revolves around drama.  Not horror drama, girl/boy drama.  Teen drama.  Drama that has been absent from the rest of the books. While I hate using the word this book would be considered “clean”.  There is extensive talk of marriage that services a purpose other then to allow for sex.  But the marriage is just more drama that I could not wait to be over.  This book does wrap up nicely.  I thought the very end was too rushed, but it does set up for a sequel series.  I don’t think a direct sequel (I could be wrong), but a new series about after.  I hope not.  I like it where it is.  I love this series, and while this is a nice wrap up, it is the worse book of the series. 

 

I waited so long to read this book.  I should have kept waiting.  Rachael was attacked in her home and accidently killed her attacker.  Flash forwards a year, she is in a new school, in a new city, trying to make friends and fit in.  But her trauma has brought on a love of horror movies.  She feels that by watching horror movies she can arm herself or train herself to not be frightened by what happened to her.  She ends up joining a secret society all about the love of a good scare.  The purpose of the club is to scare people with frights that are prank like.  But when people start getting hurt and even dying, this is no longer a prank, its life and death. 

 

This book moved fast.  It has a Gossip Girl crossed with The Game (old Michael Douglas Movie that is even mentioned in the book) feel with the poor kid in the elite private NYC school.  The only character I thought was genuine ends up dead.  The concept is interesting and does work.  The problem is it involves gamification, and that has been done much better.  I do like that the story moves quickly and at no time does the book feel like the 460+ pages it is, and while I did enjoy it, the most memorable part of the entire thing, is the cover.  While this is a standalone, and it does NOT have a cliffhanger, it has been left open for a sequel. 

 

One night a year, Sam Hall and a very small group of friends traipse off into the wood to tell their secrets to a private little hut.  A place, or an object that lets them unburden themselves of the weights on their shoulders.  

 

Sam a formal child TV star has lots of secrets.  Secrets about a fire, about his dad, about his life.  But so does everyone else. And now the blackmail has begun.  Secrets leak out, some small, some large, causing problems and danger for all. 

 

This book was okay.  It starts on Halloween and goes a few more days.  The adult in mean screams “talk to your parents or trusted adults” and this book wouldn’t exist.  To me, this book was nothing special.  It will have a hot flash in the pan this year but die off by next. 

 

This was not a book that was originally on my fantasy sci-fi list. The cover is interesting, but it didn’t grab my attention and say “you have to read me now”. This was picked by my book club and I was greatly surprised. I did enjoy this book and I’m happy to have read it. In this book Sena lives on a planet that is entirely tundra. Meaning, the whole thing is frozen. However, this planet has a plethora of EXO carbon, which is an element that everybody needs for almost everything. However, the permanent frozen condition of the planet makes the mining of this EXO carbon extremely hard. Life on this planet is hard. If the weather doesn’t get to you then the ion storms that take out anything electronic will. The one thing this planet is known for is its great race from the main living commune out to the mining field. Apparently, anyone who can complete the race can get permission to mind the exo carbon. In this book, we follow a young girl named Sena. She was born on this planet to a mother who is an immigrant and another mother, who is version of native. The two types of people don’t normally get along, so both have been shunned. Both have also died in the middle of a race leaving Sena defend her self for the last five years. What Sena really wants is to get off this planet, but the only way she can do that is find a way around her heritage, to make enough money to escape. But when your life is mainly pickpocketing, the mob bosses, casino and fight club, saving enough to live and escape, are not an option. Sena ends up in trouble with the big mob boss, and has  to take a job saving his genetically pure wolf. Volvenwolves are the predominant creatures on this planet that is a combination of cloning and what we would think of as earth wolves that make them superior to living in a tundra. To have a pure wolf just for fighting is an anomaly and this Wolf has been hurt and it’s up to Sena to fix it. All in all the stories a pretty decent one. It’s almost a reimagining of White Fang, or at least feels very much like White Fang would have felt 100 years ago. And it’s an interesting and fast paced book. There is a sequel but the sequel takes the main character and  the wolf off the planet, and focuses on a minor character from book one. I’m not sure if that makes the sequel more interesting or more likely not to pick up. My mind hasn’t been made up. Overall, I liked this book as a standalone. I thought it worked well. It was an interesting take, but for someone who’s lived on the frozen tundra I was ready for this to be over. I can remember being cold in the 50 trees in the forest because nothing can grow under that cold. So overall I like this book but I didn’t love it but I would still recommend it to people. 

 

We’re used to getting picture box from John Klassen. This year he does a little longer story and gives us the Skull. This was originally a folktale of a certain sect of Austrian people. There is a small person running away from something into the woods. They come across the house, and in the house, there is the skull who needs protecting from the rest of the skeleton. This is a folktale in the true tradition of folktales. It doesn’t have the happy everything magical ending that you would see with something Disney has gotten a hold of. If this was Cinderella, toes would be coming off. But in this case, it’s the Skull. The artwork is amazing which is what anybody expects from Klassen and the story is just on the right side of dark for spooky scary times, without being horror or too dark for young children. I loved everything about this, and in the author’s note at the end, John even talks about how he originally wrote the story and where his mind took him to the book that was published. This book is bound to be a classic just like the rest of his picture books that I’ll be heading down to my nieces and nephews for a long time to time. 

 

Murder she wrote is back in for a new generation. Jessica Fletcher is technically still around but not solving murderers anymore. However, her great niece is the new resident writer and mystery solver. Beatrice Fletcher lives in Maine in a town that is part residents and part elite boarding school. Beatrice spends her spare time writing for a true crime website all about local stories of the state of Maine. When her best friend goes missing one night, she’s sure something foul is a fight and it’s up to her to figure out what it is. This was a nice fun, cozy mystery. In the vein of the original Murder She Wrote books and television show. For as light as this book is, it drags on in the beginning, and you’re waiting to get into the mystery. This book, while about the mystery is much more about be the type of young woman she is and becoming and the life around town. This was a fine mystery that’s approachable for middle grade and up. It falls in the cozy as there is no blood guts, no horror, etc. it’s not a bad companion to the original stories, but it’s not the best mystery for the age group that’s out there. I have a hard time determining if I care to read the sequel. Not every mystery is solved in book one, there is a mystery that will arch into book 2. But one mystery is satisfactorily resolved. If you have kids who want to break into reading mysteries and may not be ready for more adult titles like Karen McManis, E. Lockhart, Tiffany Jaxon, etc. then this is the series you start with. 

 

This was fabulous. The book names various monsters like vampires and witches, and werewolves and asks, “why do they stay up late”.  The answer is almost always something mundane, but still fun.  Plus, the illustrations are just the icing on this cake.  I do wish the cover was as eye grabbing as the rest of the illustration, but his is a book that will get read over and over again. 

 

This book is alright.  The rhyming story is nice, but really doesn’t have anything to do with Halloween. That seems mostly like a marketing scheme to get more sales.  The artwork is interesting.  It is like clip art are laid over AI backgrounds.  I say this because there seems to be different art styles used.  Take for example the toucan. It does not seem to fit the same illustration  style as the swallow or as the fox.  It’s odd.  It does work, but it feels very “self-published”.  Meaning it feels like it was thrown together by a well-meaning parent to give to their child, rather than a book to really be selected and put in a library.